A THOUSAND WORDS - Alex Waterhouse-Hayward's blog on pictures, plants, politics and whatever else is on his mind.

Cuarenta, Cuarentón, Cuaresma, Quarantine & Other Stuff Related to 40

Friday, March 20, 2020

Yours truly photographed in April 1982 by Malcolm Parry. I was four months shy of 40

Sometimes speaking another language gives me access to a
curiousity of comparing words in English and Spanish, or even my bad French, Tagalog,
Italian, Portuguese and, of course Texan
English .

Take the word much in use these days, quarantine.

I know the word comes from cuarenta, Spanish for forty. If you have been raised as a Roman
Catholic (I was) then you would remember that Christ went out into the wilderness for forty
days. But I also had a nagging suspicion that Noah and his ark suffered forty
days and nights of rain. Lent is 40 days of fasting followed by many days of
feasting.

The slightly more modern term as explained below comes
from the Italian quaranata giorni for
the forty days that ships had to wait before disembarking in Venice during
the 14th century plague.

Cuarenta in Spanish has a slightly humorous (to me!) use
in labeling women of a certain age (over 40) as cuarentonas. It can get worse
if she is called a cincuentona. In the sexist times of Latin American men they are
not usually defined by the term cuarentón. I was not quite that when my face appeared on the cover of Vancouver Magazine in May 1982.

1. Forty is the only number in English which has its
letters in alphabetical order.

2. Minus 40 degrees, or “40 below”, is the only
temperature that is the same in both Fahrenheit and Celsius.

3. When the bubonic plague gripped Europe during the
Middle Ages, ships would be isolated in harbours for 40 days before passengers
could go ashore. The word quarantine originates from the Venetian dialect form
of the Italian quaranta giorni, meaning “40 days”.

4. There are 40 spaces on a Monopoly board. Proving that
life is a gamble, the game gives players equal chances (one in 40) of going
directly to jail or winning the Free Parking prize.

6. It took chemists 40 attempts to develop the magical
spray we knew as … wait for it … WD-40 (full name: Water Displacement, 40th
formula).

7. In literature, 40 is the number of thieves Ali Baba
clashes with in the “Arabian Nights” tale.

8. Also, 40 is the number of winks Dr William Kitchiner
suggests taking for a perfect nap in his 1821 guide.

9. In religion, 40 seems to be shorthand for “a long
time.” Jesus spent 40 days fasting in the wilderness being tempted by the
devil; the great flood lasted 40 days and 40 nights; the Jewish people wandered
the desert for 40 years.

The word "quarantine" originates from
quarantena, the Venetian language form, meaning "forty days] This is due
to the 40-day isolation of ships and people practiced as a measure of disease
prevention related to the plague.[13] Between 1348 and 1359, the Black Death
wiped out an estimated 30% of Europe's population, and a significant percentage
of Asia's population. Such a disaster led governments to establish measures of
containment to handle recurrent epidemics. A document from 1377 states that
before entering the city-state of Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik in Croatia),
newcomers had to spend 30 days (a trentine) in a restricted place (originally
nearby islands) waiting to see whether the symptoms of Black Death would
develop. In 1448 the Venetian Senate prolonged the waiting period to 40 days,
thus giving birth to the term "quarantine". The forty-day quarantine
proved to be an effective formula for handling outbreaks of the plague.
According to current estimates, the bubonic plague had a 37-day period from
infection to death; therefore, the European quarantines would have been highly
successful in determining the health of crews from potential trading and supply
ships.

Other diseases lent themselves to the practice of
quarantine before and after the devastation of the plague. Those afflicted with
leprosy were historically isolated long-term from society, and attempts were made
to check the spread of syphilis in northern Europe after 1492, the advent of
yellow fever in Spain at the beginning of the 19th century, and the arrival of
Asiatic cholera in 1831.

Venice took the lead in measures to check the spread of
plague, having appointed three guardians of public health in the first years of
the Black Death (1348).[15] The next record of preventive measures comes from
Reggio/Modena in 1374. Venice founded the first lazaret (on a small island
adjoining the city) in 1403. In 1467 Genoa followed the example of Venice, and
in 1476 the old leper hospital of Marseille was converted into a plague
hospital. The great lazaret of Marseille, perhaps the most complete of its
kind, was founded in 1526 on the island of Pomègues. The practice at all the
Mediterranean lazarets did not differ from the English procedure in the
Levantine and North African trade. On the arrival of cholera in 1831 some new
lazarets were set up at western ports, notably a very extensive establishment
near Bordeaux, afterwards turned to another use.